The trouble with Augustus

The Drawings of Augustus John 1901-1931

By Martin Gayford

12:00AM BST 21 Sep 1996

The Drawings of Augustus John 1901-1931

Spink & Son, SW1

WHAT went wrong with Augustus John? Everyone agrees that something did, at some stage, between his brilliant youth and the sad decline of his later years. The questions are "what?" and "when?". Judging from the new exhibition at the Spink gallery in London, Themes and Variations: The Drawings of Augustus John 1901-1931, it looks as though the artist had a problem right from the start.

Nowadays we deplore the fact that young artists are no longer taught how to draw; John had the opposite problem - he had graphic skills by the cartload, but little idea of what to do with them.

He went to the Slade at a time when the English art world was mad about the Renaissance. Under the stern eye of Professor Henry Tonks, generations of students learnt to draw with a hard Florentine line. The best - Stanley Spencer, for example - transformed this into a powerfully personal means of expression. But John never quite managed it.

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Even about the best of these drawings, there is a slight air of pastiche. One can see Rubens, for example, in the red and black chalk heads of Edie McNeill (sister of his mistress, Dorelia); Rembrandt in the etched self-portraits; Ingres in a head of Dorelia herself; Watteau in the series of sketches of the fishergirl of Equihen of 1907, and so on.

Not, of course, that it is wrong to have influences, but it is necessary to digest and transform them more than John generally did. None the less, his early work won him great praise. In his early 20s he was the bright new hope of British art, and was considered leader of the younger generation for a decade, after which doubts set in. His reputation sank and sank until in the Seventies the poet and critic Geoffrey Grigson declared him a "vulgar art-school draughtsman with a provincial mind", which is perhaps going too far.

He could have been a good light comedian of the Rex Whistler sort

As almost everyone has always declared, John really did have a lot of talent. But it went along with a lack of emotional and intellectual toughness. He was tempted into insipidity, as in the drawings of his children, and many of his mistresses. It may be no accident that some of the worst works depict an agonisingly awkward emotional situation - the sketches of his wife, Ida, and mistress, Dorelia, at the stage when John tried to settle the three of them into a ménage à trois. But one would not guess at the drama of it all from these weak drawings of simpering girls. John was an artist who tended to prettify.

The fundamental trouble was that he misunderstood his own talents. He did some delightful oil sketches of his mistress and children in landscape, and good portraits of the "swagger" school. A drawing of a drunken nymph and even drunker serenading swain from 1931 suggests he could have been a good light comedian of the Rex Whistler sort. But not only did other people expect great things of him, he also expected them himself. For most of his life he toiled at a series of large figure compositions for which he was entirely ill-equipped. Most of them never saw the light of day.

The truth was that, in so far as John had anything personal to express he wasn't a bright new hope, he was a throw back to mid-Victorian days. Not only his art, but also the biblical beard, the flowing dresses in which he clothed his womenfolk: they all remind one of nothing so much as the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood of the 1850s.

John's true talent was not unlike Dante Gabriel Rossetti's: he was good, perhaps better than Rossetti, at doing moonily romantic heads of beautiful girls. Among the best - better than those of Dorelia - are the series from 1906-7 of Alick Schepeler, another in John's army of seduced women. These do strike a genuine, personal note - melancholy and dreamy - that make the sitter a latter-day sister of Jane Morris and Elizabeth Siddal. But the pickings are slim.

'The Drawings of Augustus John' (in conjunction with the National Museum of Wales) is at Spink & Son, 5 King Street St James's, London SW1 until Oct 4, and at the Royal Cambrian Academy, Conwy, from Nov 2 to Dec 1.